A Different Conservatism

The American Solidarity Party makes the case for community and subsidiarity.

As J.D. Vance has argued, most Trump supporters aren’t fooled by their candidate’s desultory attempts to speak the language of governance. They back him because he feels their pain, or pretends to. If Vance, David Lapp, and others are correct that this election has marked the emergence of solidarity as an essential political value, then the dogmatically anti-government Republican Party may not have much of a future.

There was an American conservatism before Reaganism burst onto the scene in the latter half of the 20th century, and there will be an American conservatism after it fades from view. The American Solidarity Party is betting that the next iteration of the American right will resemble a purified Trumpism.

The party was formed in 2011 as the Christian Democracy Party USA, and like Europe’s Christian Democratic parties, it embraces a certain form of the welfare state while maintaining socially conservative positions on abortion, marriage, and family. That combination of traditionalism and solidarity with the poor bears a certain resemblance to the message that has swept Trump to the summit of the conservative movement, but party leaders stress that on a principled level they have little in common with the Republican nominee.

“[Trump] is very difficult to describe on a policy level because he doesn’t have a whole lot of policies,” Amir Azarvan told me. Azarvan became the ASP’s first presidential nominee earlier this year, but his employer, Georgia Gwinnett College, asked him to drop out of the race. (He remains on the party’s national committee.) He admits that some of Trump’s favorite talking points, like his insistence on the distinction between free trade and fair trade, could “resonate with a lot of [ASP] supporters.” But he’s inclined to doubt the GOP candidate’s commitment to his own rhetoric, especially on social issues.

The Solidarists also diverge sharply from Trump on a number of his signature issues. One is immigration: the ASP platform calls unabashedly for amnesty, takes a jab at border walls, and implies that global inequality makes immigration “a necessity” for many workers. The party also criticizes the tough-on-crime approach that Trump has adopted since the Republican National Convention and condemns torture. And whereas Trump dismays conservatives by promising to fix social dysfunction through government action and executive fiat, the Solidarists insist on subsidiarity. While they call for the establishment of a single-payer health-care system, for example, they stress that it would be administered by the states.

“[Trump] is the best thing that has ever happened to American democracy,” Azarvan said. However, he adds, that’s not because of any of the Donald’s ideas—it’s because he’s so universally hated that he’s forcing principled conservatives to seek other options. Trump may have brought a version of the politics of solidarity into the American mainstream, but the ASP rejects the aspects of his program that have been linked to white racial resentment. For the Solidarists, then, a great deal hangs on the question of what exactly is motivating Trump supporters: economic anxiety or racial animus?

ASP presidential nominee Mike Maturen told me he thinks his party actually lines up better with Middle America’s prevailing political sentiments than do either of the major parties. “Mainstream America would be sort of center-right on social issues and sort of center-left on fiscal issues,” he said. “The problem is, they don’t know we exist.”

Azarvan is less sanguine. “We are in the minority, just based on what I’ve looked at,” he said. “At the same time I think it’s just a matter of consciousness-raising. Once they discover we exist, those who otherwise thought that they were liberal or conservative might come to see that they are, in fact, Christian Democratic in their ideology.” That was Maturen’s experience; a lifelong Republican, he discovered the party while he was in the depths of the kind of political malaise that many conservatives are experiencing right now. In any case, the ASP has experienced what Maturen called “almost geometric growth” since this year’s election cycle began in earnest. “Pope Francis being so vocal about taking care of the poor and cherishing life from conception to natural death might have more people thinking along those lines,” he said, adding that the lack of “palatable options” in the mainstream is probably responsible for much of this year’s growth.

Positive articles in popular Christian sources like Mere Orthodoxy, First Things, and Front Porch Republic have also helped to drive the party’s expansion. Still, geometric growth for a party of this size doesn’t mean much if it can’t be sustained. At last count, the ASP had around 800 Twitter followers and 3,000 Facebook likes—not exactly nipping at Donald Trump’s heels and well behind other tiny outfits like the Constitution Party. Where other third parties hold conventions in hotel ballrooms, Maturen and his running mate, Juan Muñoz, recorded their five-minute acceptance speeches on webcam.

What can the ASP accomplish this November? Maturen and Azarvan both emphasized that this year’s presidential run is primarily about publicity. As befits subsidiarists, they plan to focus on local government in the medium term. But they hope that in the short term, a visible presidential campaign will put them in a position to recruit competitive candidates for local office. That way, a movement that’s mostly an internet phenomenon at the moment can transition into a stable presence on the local political scene. Maturen adds that a moderately successful campaign could give the ASP enough influence to start making policy pitches to elected officials. “If I can find the candidates or currently elected officials that are on board with what we believe, then we can sort of work together to get legislation through,” he said.

Maturen has a day job—which he has not quit—as a performing magician who plays birthday parties, corporate events, and banquets. And the ASP’s presidential candidate admits that a vote for him doesn’t necessarily represent the same intention as a vote for Trump or Clinton. “A number of our backers are feeling that nobody’s fooling themselves into thinking that we’re going to win the presidency,” he said.

But politics is the art of the acceptable, and for traditionalist conservatives who are frustrated by the conservative movement’s ongoing obsession with neoliberal economics—and with its recent leftward turn on social issues—the Solidarists are likely more acceptable in principle than either major party. Maturen and Azarvan have familiar defenses of third-party voting at their fingertips, but the best case for supporting the ASP is probably the one that takes the long view. For a party that wants to start a new political movement, every vote, Facebook post, and conversation counts double: once in this election and once in the Solidarists’ long-term project of working their way into the nation’s political consciousness.

In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission, Muslim French president Mohammed Ben Abbes’s anti-liberal policy program includes a revival of distributism. For the anti-liberal Houellebecq, a localized, communitarian economic system is the natural alternative to the West’s failed hyper-individualism. In other words, in the age of liberalism’s crisis, the future seems to belong to solidarity. The question is whether the solidarity of the future will look more like Trumpian ethno-nationalism or the ASP’s vision for an economic and cultural localism uncolored by parochial prejudice.

Some people will also ask whether the latter is even possible, especially in a secular state. Until quite recently, Christian Democratic parties seemed to be prospering in post-Christian Europe, but the latest wave of immigration is demonstrating that for many people, economic solidarity has its basis in blood ties. Still, notions of identity change quickly, and the U.S. has always been less of an ethno-state than its European counterparts. So as neoliberalism flounders around the globe, you can’t fault Maturen & Co. for believing that Christian democracy has a part to play in whatever political alignment emerges from the present American crisis.

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24 Responses to A Different Conservatism

To win me over, they would really have to explain how their immigration policy will benefit people already here and how granting amnesty will benefit a legal process of immigration. Uncontrolled immigration, such as we have, has depressed wages and also acts as a pressure release valve to decrease public demands for positive change throughout Central America. It benefits the very rich and the illegal immigrants and that’s about it. In Europe, uncontrolled immigration has much worse effects. Much of what American Solidarity says sounds good, but they have to be a lot clearer and better on this platform. It’s not about race or an ethnostate. Its about the purpose of a nation, even a propositional nation like ours. The purpose of the nation is to make life better for its citizens. Immigration should serve that end first and foremost. I’m not convinced that the solidarity position is in the best interests of Americans of any race or ethnicity. It may be in the best interests of workers who want to immigrate, but they aren’t the concern of our government.

So it’s basically Angela Merkel on immigration, Bernie Sanders on economics, and conservative on “culture war” issues. Newsflash – flooding the country with more unskilled, uneducated immigrants will (a) drive down the wages of the poorest Americans (so much for solidarity) and (b) make a government-paid healthcare system significantly more expensive and thus less politically palatable.

‘Distributism’ and ‘solidarity’ are just different words for socialism. Why sugar coat it? So-called ‘conservative’ Christian Democratic parties in Europe are socialist-lite parties, logical considering European countries until recently have been homogeneous countries, like many East Asian countries, notably Japan where they have practiced ‘distributism’ for decades now. So all well and good for more ancient countries in Europe and East Asia, but not suited for America … where solidarity has never existed since the founding with squabbling 13 colonies with origins in religious bantustans, slavery and a civil war not two generations from the foundation of the country. Contemporary America is too divided by class, race, region, accent, politics, etc to practice anything close to ‘distributism’, hence the historic animosity to anything smacking of socialism.

1. There is a lot of middle ground between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel. A pro-immigrant policy could be sensible, like Canada’s, rather than lax, like Germany’s. More people would be in favor of this than Trump’s wall. But I would agree that yes, there is work to be done to make sure immigration helps to expand our labor force rather than hurts us by driving down wages.

2. There is a big difference between Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism and the ideas of Catholic Social Teaching/Distributism that the ASP advocates. It’s actually fascinating, and you should read up on it.

3. Government-paid healthcare needs to clear some hurdles, to be sure, but it works reasonably well in almost all first-world countries, even those with large quantities of immigrants.

I don’t think distributism is another name for socialist. This party has not explained what they mean by it, although the timid proposals they put forth are in fact socialist, but distributism as I understand it (from The Servile State by Belloc, one source) distributism is broadly distributed ownership, most typically of land. A redistribution of land has been done several times in history, always with positive results as I recall, and it is being done now, by South Korea, which has given away arable land and tools, with technical and marketing help as needed, to 10,000 people last year. There are also distributist models for cooperatives and I read one a couple of years back on the distribution of ownership in new wealth. We could try all of that, and more. I make a point of talking to young people I meet of this possibility, and expect negative answers and never get them. They ARE interested. I made this social model the basis for my sci fi book, Run, in which some disaffected Catholics colonize an exoplanet, terraform it and set up a new medieval society. We could go back to the land in space.

I also find this party’s endorsement of single payer healthcare ‘as long as it is administered by the states’ to be absurd. The math for universal free health care just doesn’t work. No country in Europe save Britain has it, everyone else has a privatized version much like Obamacare, and, given the economics of our world now, they are every single one in trouble. No, we got the idea of universal health care from the medieval when substantial numbers of people went into religious orders specifically to serve Christ in the body of the poor. They took vows of poverty and worked for free. Their retirements were supported by the new young workers coming into the order, not by a government. Religious charity made the equivalent of single payer health care possible. It alone. It has never been managed since (Henry VIII’s first public act as an apostate was to privatize St. Bartholomew’s, the famous medieval hospital and refuge of the poor. Unless this party shows me the numbers, I must pass. (No party now has any idea how to fix our health care crisis. Because there is none in our for-profit states, single payer or not.)

«‘Distributism’ and ‘solidarity’ are just different words for socialism. (…) Contemporary America is too divided by class, race, region, accent, politics, etc to practice anything close to ‘distributism’, hence the historic animosity to anything smacking of socialism.»

“Distributism” means a society of self-employed small farmers and artisans – does not sound as something particularly “un-american”

Now why would they go and ruin such an interesting and different platform by kowtowing on immigration? Until they get a clue, I will take a chance with the unrepentant advocates of mass immigration that I know instead of throwing away my vote on the devil I do not.
All the best to them.

Sorry but a big government welfare state holds little appeal to mosr conservatives even when dangling the “socially consevative” carrot. Given the reality that the welfare state acts at odds with marriage and family I dont expect many people who have thought through these questions at any length are going to buy into a future of European style “consevartism” .

The problem is the natural constituency these ideas responds far more to an anti-immigration message, and isn’t really that culturally conservative anymore in practice. Same issue the Reform Conservatives are having within the GOP.

If you’re going to go third party, why not go with the Constitution Party? It sounds like it overlaps with many of the ASP concerns but adopts a much better immigration policy. Plus, the CP already has some infrastructure in place.

I’m a big fan of true distributism as discussed by Chesterton and Belloc. However, single-payer health care is not distributist in any sense. I’ve never heard distributist proposals on health care discussed, but given that distributism seeks to maximize the number of owners, my guess would be that a distributist health care system would have many small providers. A single-payer health system inevitably involves massive government oversight, and, even worse, management of medical providers.

As to immigration, there’s absolutely no discussion of limits and border enforcement in this interview; instead, it’s amnesty, rejection of a border wall, and seeing immigration solely from the point of view of the immigrants. Without any explanation of what they’d do, it sounds like open borders to me.

As another commenter posted above, most countries do not have government run health care; rather, they have a system of the same genus as Obamacare, with subsidies, exchanges, etc. The UK, Spain, Australia, Canada, and Taiwan are the only countries that are single-payer.

Thank you, Miguel. But I do not agree that we are too far gone to build a platform of the real thing. A tax policy that favors small and penalizes conglomerates –not a rapid policy, but one that we expect to take several generations to implement. A land re-distribution program such as found in South Korea (and that prohibits speculation). Citizen shares of new wealth. Government promotion of the natural family and women incentivized to care for their families (higher pay for fathers of families). I hoped this so-called solidarity party would get the discussion started, but they were not good at communicating their platform at all, and of course there’s the crazy immigration position. And most of all, a change in our constitution to recognize God. In our country that would now have to be a coalition of Catholic and protestant until we do the work of evangelizing. Distributism requires virtue. We have to be free to foster it among our young people.

It is also worth noting that the Australian healthcare budget has been outpacing GDP growth and the costs of other government functions.
Still beyond that, my impression was that conservatives tended not to be technocratic utilitarians, and considered things like personal responsibility and moral hazard.

This whole thing sounds like a centre-left party with cute words about Jesus tacked on.

“ASP presidential nominee Mike Maturen told me he thinks his party actually lines up better with Middle America’s prevailing political sentiments than do either of the major parties.” –Well, Mike *would* say that, wouldn’t he.

“The question is whether the solidarity of the future will look more like Trumpian ethno-nationalism or the ASP’s vision for an economic and cultural localism uncoloured by parochial prejudice. “
–I wasn’t aware Trump had called for an ethnostate. Not being American, I may have missed that headline. I am aware though that cultural localism is almost the definition of parochial.

As I understand it, the ASP opposes the massive cruelty to the poor and the destruction of families caused by current immigration laws. That is why it supports amnesty, path to citizenship, etc. However, nowhere does it say it supports “open borders”.

Mass immigration starts somewhere. NAFTA destroyed Mexican agriculture, and started the big wave of illegal immigration in the 90s. War in the Middle East (fueled and fed by Western countries) is causing the immigration crisis in Europe. Any sensible solution to immigration problems has to look at how US policy affects the countries that are bleeding people. Hence the final piece of the ASP platform: “In the future, we will work toward the negotiation of fair-and-free trade agreements that will make immigration a choice, rather than a necessity.”

Such a policy–address root causes but deal humanely with the real people and real families that the world’s crises produce–is about as far removed from current immigration policy as you can get. I recommend the following discussion of immigration from a different era of conservatism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixi9_cciy8w